


without no seams (nor needlework)

by philthestone



Series: then she'll be a true love of mine [8]
Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff, but does include a hand kiss, zainab sent me like 4 hand kiss prompts and this is none of those
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28781574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: He's told her before that he can tell when her touch becomes one of physicking, and not intimacy. A shift in the type of assuredness and intention. Like something in the air changes."Something in theair," Claire scoffs, rolling her eyes, dodging easily the teasing hand that comes to grab her waist. "Now you're being purposefully ridiculous.""Ye're mywife, Sassenach," Jamie laughs, like that is all the explanation she needs, like it is a reality that bestows extra dimensions of power.God knows, Claire thinks -- maybe it does. Stranger things have happened to her in these last several years.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Series: then she'll be a true love of mine [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1762789
Comments: 30
Kudos: 94





	without no seams (nor needlework)

**Author's Note:**

> i came to write a force sensitive claire au but i needed to refamiliarize myself w their voices and this emerged. it may have got away from me a little bit 
> 
> takes place after the end of "parsley sage" but before they meet joe and gale for the first time (im imagining that happens in the spring or summer approaching). though, theoretically, it doesn't /need/ context to be enjoyed. 
> 
> reviews bring my heart joy. i hope everyone is staying safe and warm this winter <3

Once upon a time they lay on a bed just like this one, covered in furs and trapped within a firelit room, and they were nearly strangers.

“Would you stop your bloody _wriggling_ , I swear. I didn’t realize God made fidgets in your size.”

“You try layin’ still while I poke at ye wi’ cold fingers! Christ, they’re like tiny wee icicles.”

How life has changed, Claire thinks. And how it hasn’t.

“I am not _poking_ at you,” she says primly, sitting up so as to properly place her (perhaps a _bit_ cold, yes) hands over her hips. “I am _trying_ to give my husband a massage.”

Jamie’s head lols over the pillow in an easy, boyish movement. Winter hasn’t yet made its way out of their little corner of the world -- its _tiny wee icicle_ fingers are still frosting over the windowpanes only recently installed, and hardening the earth in which Claire plans to plant her herb garden -- so the fireplace in their bedroom is full of life, crackling hot and orange. The light dances over the sparse corners of the room and makes the curls flopping over Jamie’s forehead light up golden like the flames. 

One of his eyebrows twitches upward. But she can see his lips thinned and pursed at their center like he’s trying not to laugh, the _bastard_. 

“Do you know something,” Claire says.

“I’d wager ye’ll tell me in a moment.”

“Do you know something, you can _take_ your wager --”

“-- Is that what the something was?”

“-- and _shove_ it _right_ up --”

“Och, is that any way tae speak to an ailin’ man?”

There is ritual about everything in this moment, from their easy positions atop the fir mattress to the dog-trotting pace of their silliness. It underpins the newer things -- the firm maple baseboards and their tall sister walls, the mattress itself, the slightly poor fit of Claire’s shift, which she made herself, because her old one had endured army-travel-tragedy sweat and baby spit-up (a first round, then a second) and most recently Adso’s little claws, before succumbing to full disintegration. 

With ease of practice Jamie scoops one hand beneath her thigh and hoists her further up the bed. She figures the maneuver must be mostly for the benefit of his other hand, which now has excellent access to the realestate of her bum.

He sighs happily.

“Bless ye Lord,” he tells the ceiling, “fer granting me the gift of a round-bottomed woman.”

“You are not _ailing_ ,” Claire says, pushing both of his hands away and placing them firmly back down on the mattress, palms face-up, her wrist bones pressing against his. They’re a bit slippery with Claire’s diligently stored and kept peppermint oil -- her hands, that is, and that one spot behind his neck she was working on before rude interruption -- and he isn’t _ailing_ by any means, no. But she’s watched him surreptitiously try to hide the ache in his shoulder all day. She plops herself back down onto her knees and huffs. “What, would you rather I be making love to you right now?”

Jamie looks at her disbelievingly.

“ _Obviously_ yes,” he says. 

She supposes she did just walk right into that one. She huffs again, then drags two fingers up the strong line of his arm, over the slight jut of his basilic vein and up to the dip behind his collar bone, watching him follow her trajectory with a lopsided smile and drooping eyelids. Then she digs the fingertips firmly into his muscle. 

Jamie visibly winces.

“ _Ha_ ,” Claire says. 

“ _Sassenach_.” 

He’s not quite whining, but Claire ignores it anyway. Methodically, she goes right back to what she was doing, the cache of spots _known_ stored in her muscle memory: right metatarsal, trapezius, upper part of left leg. Her hands are firm and assured in their movements. They always are, to a degree, where healing is an extension of herself -- a zone she slips into unwittingly -- but also, this is Jamie. Jamie’s _body_. She knows it almost better than she knows her own. 

“Tell me about your day,” she says lightly. She has a mental inventory for that too, but it’s in far broader strokes. Firewood was chopped, probably; traps checked, with Fergus’s help; leak fixed in the little shack sworn to one day soon become her surgery but _currently_ used for smoking their small store of game (and Claire cannot help but flush with a certain feminine pride that her _husband_ is _building_ her a _surgery_ \-- something she told Murtagh and was laughed at); _and_ he spent some time with Bran, making sure her stables are warm enough for the late March cold and likely examining that shoe of hers that’s been bothering her. She knows he always takes extra time with her because he misses Donas. And Willie and Bree had done that with him, she thinks, because they had not stopped chattering about it all through supper, Bree in her chirrupy little voice and Willie in that excitable babble unique to three-year-olds.

“It’s no’ that I’m no’ grateful fer yer ministrations, _mo chridhe_ ,” Jamie is saying. Claire hums, shifting, so that she can plant one practical knee directly over his stomach. “But I -- _oomf_ \-- Claire --”

“Hush,” Claire says cheerfully. 

“I ken ye’re happiest when ye’re physicking, Sassenach, but ye dinna have tae -- _hhnnmm_.”” 

The rest of the protest dissolves into a garbled noise of relief. It’s half-sighing and full-bodied and completely involuntary. Claire smoothes her palms rather triumphantly over the spot she just worked.

“Yes?”

“Mmm.” Jamie’s eyes have fluttered closed. “Feels goo’.”

“Yes darling, I know.”

But her expression gentles. 

Jamie’s endurance is a mythic, stubborn thing. It makes her angry sometimes, with caged-cat combativeness, because by nature it invites things to challenge it. It is not _invincible_. _He_ is not indestructible. The knowledge of it frightens her. Under her fingers the solid lines of his muscle are as strong as they were the day they met. If anything, their years together have rendered a grounded quality to previously youthful energy, like it’s more integrally a part of him now, and may never completely leave. 

Still. There are things that are universal to all bodies. The cold and damp make the bones in his left hand ache. He never limps, but sometimes his leg will bother him, in a twitchy sort of way that Claire can catch from across a room only if she tries really hard. Most recently he’s been rolling his right shoulder when he thinks she’s not looking, as though to loosen it. 

It’s still new, this sense of safety they’ve built. Barely there, in a way that she hopes will take root and blossom once the winter packs its bags properly, and she can plant her first seedlings in this new place of theirs. So she can understand it -- his tendency to brush aside these minor discomforts. There’s something about him though, sprawled here beneath her and full of teasing vibrance, coupled with the knowledge she carries, of each old injury time has dulled then brought back to life in a different way. It’s one of _those_ feelings, that she didn’t know she could feel before Jamie. 

She feels it all the time now -- with the children, with Murtagh’s gentle gruffness, with the bloody cat even -- and it’s this tender thing. Claire doesn’t know.

She nudges at Jamie’s shoulder and he rolls over easily onto his front, understanding the unspoken directive through some kind of marital telepathy Claire’s yet to understand fully. Under her fingers the skin covering his scapulae is ridged and tight and rubbery. Claire thinks that if she closed her eyes, she would know the exact position of every scar from touch memory alone.

“It’s almost spring again,” Claire says. Her hands work in quick subconscious movements. Spring is always the start of something new, for them. Or the end of something old.

“Aye,” says Jamie, muffled into the pillow. “Ye can plant yer seedlings, no?”

She feels the corners of her mouth twitch upward and round out her smile.

“Very much so. Bree wants primroses.”

“I ken she does,” Jamie says. She can hear his smile softening. “D’we have any?”

“A few.” She’s shocked herself, really, with how long she’s managed to hold onto them. They’re from Jenny’s garden, blossoming against the back wall that was Claire’s little spot. Before they had to leave their _place_ and _people_ behind.

They would find new ones, she had told Jamie. That had been at the tail end of a winter, too.

Claire is hopeful still.

“Weel, they’re verra bonny, Sassenach. I think ye should.”

“I’ve plenty of rosemary too -- and Fergus asked for mushrooms. Oh, _radishes_. And I think I can harvest some more goldenseal and ginseng when the weather grows warmer, and then plant them for myself.”

“Mmhmm. Ye ken Claire, I canna help but imaginin’ ye in sunshine, in the little garden plot ye’ll have built, tendin’ yer wee herbs as ye do.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s makin’ me feel unspeakable things. Confessionable ones.”

Claire bears down on a knot right between his shoulder blades, and Jamie groans. It’s loud enough that it cuts through the cocooning quietude of their bedroom.

“Easy, soldier,” she says. “We don’t want the children getting wrong ideas.”

“Aye, they already got those last week,” he mumbles, batting a hand behind him to swat at her thigh; she catches his hand easily and tugs on one finger, laughing lightly as she does, “when ye put on that wee harlot contraption of yours.”

Again: ritual even in the new. Claire scoots herself to the side, hauling him back onto his back so that she can look down at him. She plants one hand firmly on either side of his arms and raises both of her eyebrows.

“A _brassier_ ,” Claire says.

She’d been stitching her new shift anyway; figuring out the general shape of a twentieth century bra using discarded lace from her only remaining lady’s dress was mostly just a personal challenge. 

“It was _indecent_ , Claire,” Jamie says, looking quite happy about it.

“You’re the only person who’ll ever see it, you ridiculous man.”

He grins, full and lopsided. Those eyes of his sparkle cobalt at her for all the unpredictable firelit shadow, and softly, he reaches up and tugs at one of her loose curls, then another one. She can feel his chest rise and fall -- she’s practically sitting on top of him, after all -- in easy, steady, _living_ movements. She thinks again of that endurance. Bree had confided in her the other week that she thought Jamie’s person was so big because all of his soul had to go _somewhere_. 

_No wee person wi’ skinny legs c’n keep up with how much’s in Da’s_ heart _, Mama,_ she had declared. _He’s gotta have th’_ energy _for it._

She catches Jamie’s hand in her own as it falls away from her face and towards his chest, and closes her fingers around it. It is her next destination -- his hand is -- and she can imagine where her thumbs will press gently into the centre of his palm, his knuckles. The smell of peppermint is sharp and fresh around them, coupled with duller scents of a lived-in bedroom, even new as it is, and the woody cocoon of the fire and baseboards. She turns the hand over, tracing the strong juts of bone. Her thumb leaves an oily smudge over one faded pink line. She looks up. Jamie’s peering at her curiously.

“Claire,” he says, far quieter than before.

It’s not really a question, which is good, because she doesn’t have much of an answer. Quietly, she lifts the hand up and presses a kiss to the back of it.

Jamie’s mouth opens, but he doesn’t get a chance to respond; from the other side of the bedroom door, there sounds a muted, plaintive voice:

“Mama?”

It feels like in two steps she is on the other side of the room, easing the door she’d helped Jamie install open. William’s big blue eyes are droopy and sleepy and his curly head is in tangled disarray. One thumb pokes resolutely into his mouth.

Claire sighs.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks seriously.

“Bwee kep’ _kickin’_ me,” he complains, with late-night solemnity. It’s not quite a whine. If anything, the tone sounds just like Jamie’s might. Claire bites back a smile. “‘N then I had a -- a bad _dream_.”

“Oh, Willie.” Her voice gentles completely of its own accord. There is a small shuffle behind her, melted into the crackle of the fire, and Jamie is saying,

“C’mere, _mo balach_ ,” in one of those soothing rumbles that seems built for the children, one arm extended in easy invitation. 

Claire follows behind William as he patters over to the bed on quick little-boy feet. He clambers up onto the mattress with Claire’s hand gently giving his bum a boost, and in a moment he has wormed his way over to Jamie, curling up by his father’s warm body the way Adso does by the fire. Jamie is belatedly rooting around for his discarded sark, and he fumbles to pull it over his head now, before rolling Willie easily into his arms. His hair has emerged a beautiful red-gold tangle, mussed as his son’s is.

“Were y’sleepin’ _nekkid_ , Da,” William inquires, small against the pillow and his father’s arm. Claire watches Jamie’s eyebrows raise, and the twitch in his cheek that means he’s biting back a smile.

“No, _m’annsachd_. I’ve my bedclothes on now, see?”

“Mama says w’canna sleep nekkid o’ we’ll catch _cowd_.”

“Aye, well yer Mam’s verra canny about these things. Best listen to her.”

“Mama’s th’cannest,” Willie declares.

And then he’s asleep.

Claire, still standing, damps the fire, then returns and climbs into the bed after him. She can see Jamie’s own lashes drooping over the top of William’s downy head, but he looks up when she settles, catching her eye again, and smiles at her, like he's understood whatever it was earlier that she was trying to say.

**Author's Note:**

> im realizing i dont know if m'annsachd is feminine-only or can also be used for boys so if anyone is a linguist out there please feel free to tell me


End file.
